


Stranger Things Have Happened

by boxparade



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Panic At The Disco
Genre: Cynical, Gambling, Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Time Travel, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-15
Updated: 2011-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-26 02:36:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/277729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boxparade/pseuds/boxparade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where Brendon is a cynical bastard and Spencer is an alien that's...also rather cynical? and the whole thing is kind of weird and fucked-up.</p><p>I have no idea where I'm going with this. Except, upon writing further, it occurred to me that my character for Brendon may be slightly...sociopathic.</p><p>Extremely sociopathic.</p><p>Sorry about that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stranger Things Have Happened

**Author's Note:**

> Possibly a Doctor Who-like...thing. I don't know. Blue box and all that. I imagine this is the beginning of something much larger but I was in a strange mood when I wrote it so this style is going to be hard for me to maintain.
> 
> If you have ideas for a plot, let me know. Seriously. I have no ideas right now. (comment or email boxparade@gmail.com)

There’s a moment. A moment when you realize what the sum of your life is, and you can see everything ahead of you so clearly that it feels like certainty. It feels like knowing. It feels like fate.

It rarely ever happens that way, of course. There’s always that little chip in the glass, the crack that you can’t see until it’s been worn down and split open. But it’s there, and all your certainties in the future and what your life is meant to be only matter in that single moment. That one moment that you can never quite recapture, even if you spend your entire life trying. That single moment where everything sprawls out in front of you like a thousand stars falling into the ocean. Every moment glows.

But it’s gone before you know, and you can spend the rest of your time remembering it, desperate for the solid strings of fate you felt in that moment. Or you can forget. You can forget and move on with life, wading through everything like it’s marred with the weight of a thousand unanswered questions and uncertainties. You can struggle against the tide like everyone else, never quite able to remember how to walk on water, or you can stall in reminiscence and get sucked away by the rip tides.

Most people forget. It’s the best option, really. It’s the only way to ensure the continuity of life. It’s how the human race survives.

And then, there’s Brendon. Brendon the anomaly. Brendon the weird kid, that guy that sits in the corner of the playground and talks to the chalk scribbles on the wall like they can talk back. Brendon, that kid a few marbles short of a whole set.

By now, he’s accepted that he’s different. He understands why people avoid him. He understands why his parents worried so much when he was in kindergarten and painting the stars with finger paint on the undersides of tables. Why they worried when he was in grade school and got in trouble for sitting on the far swings long past recess ended until one of his teachers finally realized he’d gone missing. Why they worried when he was in high school and locked himself in the music room during P.E. so he wouldn’t have to wait for all the other kids to finally get their aim right and beam him in the head with the kickball. The soccer ball. The basketball. The baseball. Once, the baseball bat. They missed that time.

He doesn’t go to college. He doesn’t because he knows; he always knows. It’s not the best path for him. He’s going to go and he’s going to be the outsider still, and he’s going to drop out because he’s bored. So he doesn’t go because it’s a waste of his parents’ money and it’s a waste of his time. Instead, he gets a job at a casino and waits. He waits because he knows he only has a few more years before the twisted way his mind works finally spins him around so much that he becomes convinced that death is but the next great adventure. He hasn’t gotten there yet, but a part of him knows he will. It’s the way things are.

Knowing so much is hard like that, sometimes.

But Brendon’s used to it. He’s used to knowing more than his teachers can teach, sometimes more than his teachers can understand. He knows more than his parents. He knows more than some of the people running the country. But it’s all situational knowledge. He can’t do medium level algebra, but he doesn’t need to be able to. It’s not pertinent to his survival. He knows the things that are necessary for him to know, and he knows the way things work. The way life works.

He knows the important things.

Except, somehow, he didn’t know about Spencer Smith.

Spencer Smith the Fifth, and his strange blue box.

 

Brendon’s only nineteen. He’s turning twenty soon, but he doesn’t keep track of the days anymore because his parents are trying this thing where they cut him off and try to force him into “pulling himself together” so that his life resembles something recognizable and not so stagnant. He knows they’ll call, eventually, but it won’t be for quite awhile. By then he’ll be old enough to have broken all of his parents’ morals. They won’t understand him, but they’ll try.

He walks to work because he doesn’t have a car and he hates biking. The weather is warm all year round, and even in a city as theatrical as Vegas is, he knows all the back roads where you’re more likely to find a dead body than a Cirque du Soleil performer. No joke there.

His job isn’t nearly as interesting as everyone seems to think it is. Yeah, some of his coworkers spend most of their days dressed as playboy bunnies and everyone he gives drinks to is placing all their hopes, and all their money with it, into the cards on the table or the ball bouncing around the roulette or the lever and the spinning flashes of color, never quite lining up correctly.

But it’s good money and he gets a lot of tips from people that are having lucky nights. Most of them are having lucky nights, anyway. Brendon can always spot the card counters, but he lets them by because he thinks inventing a game that can be won by logic and memory—and then making logic and memory against the rules—is just plain stupid.

He serves drinks and smiles at the people that are convinced this next one is going to be their lucky one, that they can feel it, that they _know._ They’re never right, of course, but Brendon’s long gone before they finally realize that they blew all their money on a rigged game—well, not quite rigged, but a game based entirely on chance that also may occasionally depend on how much money the casino needs for their next big expansion.

He just serves the drinks. They never let him play because they know he’s intelligent enough to count cards and get away with it, and he never plays because he knows it’s a waste of the little money he does have. He’d rather spend his tips on food. Or books. Spending money on either of those has a much lower possibility of sending him to jail, or getting him fired. It works out for everyone.

Brendon’s on his break, hovering over by the bar and making goo-goo eyes at the new bartender girl because she doesn’t know him well enough yet to give him free mojitos. He likes to watch the flow of people sometimes, try to pick out the ones that are regulars to the casino life and the ones that are just visiting Vegas for a weekend doomed to be almost completely forgotten. It’s enough of a game to keep him amused. He only gets a half hour off, anyway. It’s not as if he could go anywhere else.

Brendon can’t really explain what happens next, except that maybe it’s the first time he’s ever encountered someone so exotic, so foreign to him, that he’s let spinning without a chance at the world at getting a read. It doesn’t hit him suddenly, but rather creeps up. There’s a man in a suit with a bright purple tie, standing awkwardly behind the slots players and watching them all with wide, hungry eyes. At first, there’s nothing all that surprising about him. Brendon’s seen every kind of person in here, from congressmen to wholesome mothers of three that only buy organic. He’s seen pimps and he’s seen the average joe, and Brendon knows his people. He knows his gamblers.

But this guy, he realizes—he’s not hungry. That was wrong. He’s _fascinated_. He’s intrigued, and maybe a little bit confused, and he’s watching the slots players like he’s never seen anyone do something like that before. Brendon’s heard of those weird people that live off the grid, up in the woods somewhere without television, but he still finds it hard to imagine some young guy randomly decides to come to Vegas and that he hasn’t even heard a glimmer of the concept of the slot machines.

Brendon wants to know where that devouring look in his eyes comes from.

The bartender bunny girl—her name is Melody, or at least that’s what she says her name is—is chattering away in his general direction, and he doesn’t really want to pay attention to her now that she’s finally interested in all the reasons why Brendon should get free drinks. Brendon pushes himself away from the bar, the bunny girl Melody cuts off abruptly and a little miffed, and Brendon advances toward the man without reserve.

He notices Brendon approaching but doesn’t turn to look, which Brendon finds to be another interesting thing about his character. His mystery. He stops short right next to the man, watching his profile as he watches the levers on the slot machines bob up and down, and he’s still enthralled. Like slot machines are some sort of grandiose show. Rare diamonds in a field of coal and stone, or the only color in a white and grey-washed room.

“You’re intrigued,” Brendon states, because it’s true and he seems like the kind of guy that takes blatant honesty at value.

“Why do they keep pulling the levers?” He asks, bemused. “They must understand enough about logic to understand that the chance of succeeding is extremely low.”

Brendon shrugs. He’s seen a lot of gamblers pass in and out through the years and he’s still mostly trying to figure out what it is that makes them all tick. Sometimes it’s different. Most of the time, though, it’s strikingly predictable. “They hope,” Brendon says, because it seems like an answer.

“Hope doesn’t increase their chance of winning or sway the odds in their favor. Each singular action stands on its own; time is irrelevant. Hope is a useless concept.”

Brendon sucks in a breath and holds it, stands in silence next to the stranger for a bit. He’s never met someone like this in a casino. He’s never met someone like this anywhere. He thinks he could get used to this type of thinking, this worldview so alien that it’s new even to him. He doesn’t know enough about it to predict the philosophy. It rests on an entirely different foundation that he can’t quite grasp, and that’s fascinating. Fascinating, and possibly a little terrifying. But terror, like hope, is a fairly useless concept. One way or another, there is no valid fear, because even fear of death is just fear of endless sleep. Hope, fear, love; they all seem pretty irrelevant when humanity exists for so short a time, comparatively. To the universe, our lives, our hopes, fears, lovers: they mean nothing.

If the universe were to blink, they could very well miss the entirety of the human race. And yet we think we have the time to ponder such concepts as _hope._

“Amen to that.”


End file.
